SCIENCE ALERT: Fish Buttholes May Be the Reason We Now Have Fingers (2025)

RABBITSNAKE · 2025-09-22T00:00:00Z

Photograph documenting Science Alert by RabbitSnake, a 20" × 24" acrylic-on-cardboard street artwork created during the Autumn Equinox in Austin, Texas, 2025. The piece is based on a real viral science headline published by ScienceAlert reading: “Fish Buttholes May Be The Reason We Now Have Fingers, Study Finds.” Recreating the visual language of mobile news feeds and click-driven internet media through painted cardboard, simplified iconography, and handmade lettering, the work translates a bizarre but scientifically legitimate evolutionary headline into a physical public object. The piece explores absurdity, mutation, evolutionary continuity, digital information culture, and the collapsing boundary between scientific discovery and meme aesthetics. Compressing millions of years of evolutionary biology into the emotional grammar of doomscrolling and viral content consumption, the work reflects RabbitSnake’s ongoing interest in hybridity, transformation, and the strange pathways connecting humans to other life forms. Installed directly within the urban environment, the cardboard painting transforms disposable material into a temporary public artifact where internet culture, folk art, science communication, and street intervention collide.